Spartacus: Swords and Ashes

uneven ground of a winter forest.

But, like Bronton, he would not go down without a fight. He hurled his spear at the onrushing wall of Getae, whipping out his sword and yelling in defiance. His first victim fell screaming, tripping those behind him as they tumbled over his fallen body. He was waiting for them with his sword and shield, the latter shunting foes aside, the former cracking through their fearsome bone masks into the soft flesh beneath.

He heard other Thracians rushing to the point of ambush. He delighted in the wet thuds of spears and swords connecting with Getae bodies. He exulted as their enemies’ shrieks of battle-readiness gave way to cries of pain and surprise, as the Thracians converged on his position.

In the distance, he could hear the babbling incantations of the Getae sorceress, but paid her no heed. There was business to attend to closer to hand. His dented shield was torn from his arm. He grabbed a Getae warrior by his topknot and dragged him before him, slitting his enemy’s throat, and keeping the body clutched in front of him as a human shield. The man twitched and jerked as Getae spears prodded at his dying form, while fresh blood coursed down his killer’s body, bringing welcome warmth to a cold battle.

The snow-covered ground became a clash of pinks and crimsons, darkening with the death of the day, not from the sunset, but from life-blood splashed in torrents. Warm steam rose from the ground, creating an unearthly mist, as if the surviving warriors were surrounded by the departed souls of their fellows.

He fought amid such ominous shades, seeing only the foes in front of him, trusting to his Thracian comrades to shield his flanks from the Getae. Their darting, whirling attacks seemed to slow, as if coming at him through water. His reactions, too, dawdled to a crawl, and, though his mind remained as swift, his body was slow to react, like a plough pulled by tired oxen.

There were flashes of other memories. Of places and times that were far removed.

Sura giggled and splashed water at him, knee deep in the rushes at the bank of the River Istros, in spring.

Their mouths met, their lips entwined, their bodies naked in a warm summer field.

She glowed with pride, as he handed her father the casket containing her bride-price. It had been autumn.

And Sura was at his side in the snow. That was not right. He remembered this battle. He had fought in this battle for real, when he was a younger man. His wife had not been there. He tried to tell the dream that his wife should not be there, but his mouth was too slow to respond.

The dream-Sura danced through the battle in glee, laughing as he fought his way toward her. She ducked swords and spears, and entwined herself around tree trunks, barely clothed.

“Return to me, my husband!” she cried, her arms outstretched as if to embrace him. “Kill the Getae and return, so that we may make more Thracians!” She laughed, musically, as the first arrows whisked past her head.

Even with time slowed, the arrows darted through the forest as swift as wasps, in twos and threes, and then in dozens, their passage marked by low, threatening thrums as their fletchings buzzed in the cold forest air.

He looked back at the hilltop, saw the sorceress, her arms exulting in command before a triple line of archers, preparing for a second salvo. One side of her face seemed decorated with tattoos in swirls and spikes. She raised her arm, her sleeve falling away, revealing similar pigments there. And then her arm dropped in a decisive movement, unleashing a humming, whistling wall of death.

The Greeks had no time for bows and arrows. Archers hunted birds and game-not men. No real man brought a bow to war, and so Greek design did not defend against such attacks. Greek-made armor was limited, and designed to thwart strikes from a phalanx of men with spears and swords directly ahead. It was not fashioned to protect the extremities and flanks from cowardly darts from a distance.

As the arrows streamed into the forest, they caught the Thracians unprepared. They broke comically on helmets or caught in crests; they thudded into trees and caromed from shields. But the arrows kept coming, darkening the sky in a swarm, hitting home with the sheer law of averages, plunging into eye sockets, cracks in armor; lodging in upper arms and lower ankles.

He felt the sting of an arrow in his heel, and laughed at it-wounded like Achilles.

For a moment, he felt unfamiliar sunlight dapple on his eyelids, and rocked as if on a moving cart. He heard the clop of horse’s hooves on a road and stirred, briefly, in realization. A voice, indistinct and impotent, reminded him that this forest battle had happened long ago.

He need not fear. He would not die.

This was a memory! This was a dream! This was not really happening. He willed himself to wake up, but still fought on, trapped in his invisible cage. Because Sura had not been there when this battle took place, and some part of his dream-self could not let her go unprotected, not even in sleep.

Sura stood, oblivious, in the forest, picking an out-of-season fruit from a dead tree. She held it up toward him, her hand bearing an apple crawling with maggots, as another volley of arrows hummed into the forest.

He shouted at her to get down, to drop to the forest floor, but instead she held out her arms toward the oncoming swarm. He saw her pierced in a hundred places, bloodied in a forest of fletchings as she screamed and called out his name-

“Spartacus!” Varro’s voice pierced his dream.

“I am not…” he began, groggy. Autumn sunlight scattered through trees that moved overhead. He lay on wood… on a cart, on a moving cart, in chains. The other slaves stared at him in some irritation.

“You dreamed,” Varro said. “Loudly, of terrible things.”

Spartacus shook his head and wiped his eyes.

“I dreamed,” he said, “I was free.”

There was little to say. The cart rumbled along the road, its horses steadily dragging it up the gentle undulations of the Appian Way, south toward Neapolis. In its rear were stacked crates of garum-the fish sauce no Roman kitchen could do without-and a huddle of human cargo.

There was little to see. Fields, forests and hills. But no slave farmer cared to greet a passing cart, and no lurkers watched from the woods.

There was little to do. Spartacus sat, silent, lost in thought. The giant Barca’s eyes were closed, his eyelids twitching, dreaming of Carthaginian glories. Cycnus, the hairy Galatian, lolled, not asleep but not awake, rolling with the shaking of the cart. Bebryx, of the close-knotted hair and jet-black skin, glared out at the forest. When their cart rumbled past travelers on the road, he stared at them defiantly, as if inviting attack. Varro wore his own chains heavily, unused to manacles but unable to protest to the freeman-a voluntary gladiator was still a voluntary slave, and lacked the freeman’s right to better treatment.

Something smelled.

Spartacus sniffed tentatively at the air.

“Perhaps,” Varro said, “one of the garum kegs has split?”

Nobody answered him, unless by answer one could mean the endless rambling of their traveling companion, an emaciated old man in rags, his head covered in sores, his arms perilously thin.

“Are you him?” he asked the air. “Are you the one?”

The gladiators did their best to ignore him, as they had done ever since Capua.

“I had a son,” he continued. “I think. I had a son. I never saw him. When I was strong, I was taken for breeding. I never saw her face. I never saw her again. But if my seed was true, then she was the mother of my child.”

Suddenly, the wasted, bony hand clutched at Spartacus’s arm. The milky eyes fixed him with unexpected clarity.

“Do not get old,” the man said. “Do not get old.”

“I am a gladiator,” Spartacus replied. “A state I am not likely to meet.”

There was the unmistakeable sound of evacuating bowels.

“By the gods,” Varro said, wincing. “It is not the fish sauce. To be sure, it is not the fish sauce.”

The old man seemed unaware that he was sitting in his own filth.

“The Gracchi will save us,” the old man said. “The brothers Gracchi. Free corn for the masses. Free land for